Phew. Spirit, the rover that just kept on truckin’ but then decided to take a break from truckin’ to do some snoozin’, rebootin’ and some forgettin’ has finally started truckin’ again.

The troubled rover, which stopped behaving properly on April 11, was finally deemed safe enough by its Earth-bound controllers, to take a drive on Thursday April 23. It went 1.7 metres.

But things aren’t completely fixed, and the command team is braced for more trouble: “We expect we will see more of the amnesia events, and we want to learn more about them when we do,” said JPL’s Sharon Laubach, chief of the rover sequencing team, which develops and checks each day’s set of commands. (Press release)

To help prevent memory losses infuture, Spirit’s daily ‘nap’ will now happen before it begins to gather data to store it on its RAM drive. This way, if the snooze-resistant flash memory fails again, the team here on Earth will still get daily updates.

The press coverage continues, but there is a sense of the vultures hovering – this slightly good news story failed to gather as much coverage as the news from the past two weeks of Spirit’s failing and ailing. Is news of continued health less immediately interesting to the press? Does a rover have to die to get headlines these days? (Physics Today, MSNBC, Universe Today)

Image the ‘Von Braun’ mound, taken by Spirit on April 8 2009. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech